Histogram of Oriented Gradients Meet Deep Learning: A Novel Multi-task Deep Network for Medical Image Semantic Segmentation

Binod Bhattarai* (Corresponding Author), Ronast Subedi, Rebati Raman Gaire, Eduard Vazquez, Danail Stoyanov

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)
1 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

We present our novel deep multi-task learning method for medical image segmentation. Existing multi-task methods demand ground truth annotations for both the primary and auxiliary tasks. Contrary to it, we propose to generate the pseudo-labels of an auxiliary task in an unsupervised manner. To generate the pseudo-labels, we leverage Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOGs), one of the most widely used and powerful hand-crafted features for detection. Together with the ground truth semantic segmentation masks for the primary task and pseudo-labels for the auxiliary task, we learn the parameters of the deep network to minimize the loss of both the primary task and the auxiliary task jointly. We employed our method on two powerful and widely used semantic segmentation networks: UNet and U2Net to train in a multi-task setup. To validate our hypothesis, we performed experiments on two different medical image segmentation data sets. From the extensive quantitative and qualitative results, we observe that our method consistently improves the performance compared to the counter-part method. Moreover, our method is the winner of FetReg Endovis Sub-challenge on Semantic Segmentation organised in conjunction with MICCAI 2021. Code and implementation details are available at:https://github.com/thetna/medical_image_segmentation.
Original languageEnglish
Article number102747
JournalMedical Image Analysis
Volume85
Early online date24 Jan 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2023

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgements
This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS) [203145/Z/16/Z]; the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/P027938/1, EP/R004080/1, EP/P012841/1]; and the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies Scheme; and EndoMapper project by Horizon 2020 FET (GA 863146). For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.

Data Availability Statement

We made code public. The link is shared in the paper.

Keywords

  • Semantic segmentation
  • Multi-task learning
  • Self-supervised learning
  • Histogram of Oriented Gradients

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